by Heide Goody
“Is that so?” said Manfred.
“And what’s this white bird with the yellow comb of feathers? Is that a real bird?”
“I found a picture of it in one of the library co–”
“Spartacus! PJ! Jefri!” Carol suddenly yelled. “What did I just tell you? Up that end! There! Where I can see you!”
A hand tugged at Bastian’s habit. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Thor Lexworth-Hall, asking him for the umpteenth time if there was any food to be had.
“Is your monstarary haunted?” asked Pixie Kaur.
“Do you believe we live on after we die?” Bastian countered.
“Nah, I’m asking if you’ve got ghosts in the castle.”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“I told you it was a man in a dungeon,” said Araminta Dowling.
“What was?” asked Bastian.
“Cos I thought it was a ghost,” said Pixie.
“What was?”
“Him,” said Pixie and pointed at one of the large flat screens on the wall. Whereas the other screens displayed live images of the rain-sodden lawns, the silent apiaries and some soggy and miserable peacocks, this screen was taken up by the grey low-res image of Father Eustace, rocking back and forth in his wardrobe and seemingly singing to himself.
“Oh, my,” said Bastian. “Yes, that’s our, our abbot. He’s on a sponsored sit-in.”
“He looks like one of them mad people.”
“All part of the act,” Bastian assured her, without much conviction.
Stephen’s plans to unpack and catalogue the final box of library books had been stymied somewhat by the arrival of a miniature film crew. Their mere sticky-fingered presence amongst his pristine glass cabinets and polished shelves was enough of a distraction. Then there was the bombardment of questions by a pre-teen video-journalist called Spartacus.
“Do you whip yourself?” he asked, holding a pencil as a pretend microphone while his cameraman, PJ, filmed.
“Whip?” said Stephen, standing over the Librum Magnum Daemonum, originally with the intention of reading some more, now just sheltering it from the dervishes of destruction.
“Or that thing where you stick nails in yourself?”
“Nails? What? Like mortifying of the flesh?”
“Yeah. I saw this film where this killer monk, real pasty he was, had all these pins and nails in his leg.”
“No,” said Stephen. “None of us are albino assassins ... yet!”
“Yeah, right,” said Spartacus. “It’s illegal to lie to children. We could sue you. What’s that?”
Spartacus’s pointing finger came perilously close to the Big Book of Demons.
“It’s a very old book,” said Stephen.
“Eoram inertia,” Spartacus read out slowly. “What is that?”
“It’s Latin,” said Stephen.
“It sounds like Harry Potter words. Is it a magic book?”
Stephen sighed. “Well, sort of.”
Spartacus looked at Stephen shrewdly. Stephen imagined that, given ten years and an extra two feet in height, that would be the look Spartacus would be giving men a second or two before smashing a pint glass in their faces.
“Are you wizards?”
“Why not?” Stephen muttered. “Yes, Spartacus. We’re albino wizard assassin monks. You got me.”
“Knew it,” said PJ from behind his camcorder.
“Hey!” called a boy from the doorway. “Look what I’ve found!”
There was sufficient excitement in his voice to pull Spartacus and PJ away and out into the corridor without so much as a parting remark to Stephen. In fact, Stephen considered, that level of excitement probably indicated something forbidden, possibly dangerous, and, as a responsible man, he ought to follow them. But the peace and silence that they had left in the wake of their departure was too blissful to resist, and Stephen let them go. Out of sight, out of mind. Let them be someone else’s problem.
“Now,” he said, circling with his finger over the page to find his place. “Belphegor,” he read, “prince of … sloth seduces men by helping them make … ingeniosa … oh, ingenious devices to make them rich. His power is strongest in April. He tempts … the foolish? ... into laziness and makes them fall asleep while they work. Monks – Ha! – are to beware his devices and … laqueum? ... traps?”
The lift descended rapidly into the bowels of the Fortress of Nameless Dread. When it stopped, Rutspud imagined that he was probably several hundred storeys below what passed for ground level. The doors slid open.
The demon in the steam-powered wheelchair looked up from his notepad and peered at Rutspud through a pair of thick spectacles. Belphegor was uniformly purple in colour, apart from the grey whiskers that sprouted in clumps from his cheeks, brows and various warts upon his wrinkly, pot-bellied body. Hell’s chief inventor and scientist had the essential appearance of a giant hairy raisin with arms and a head.
Rutspud bowed.
“Lord Belphegor, I am Rutpsud.”
“I should hope so,” croaked the ancient demon. “Otherwise one of us is in the wrong place. Lord Peter has informed me that you are to bring a breath of fresh air to my department.”
“I am only here to serve, sir.”
“I don’t like suck-ups, Rutspud,” said Belphegor. “Remember that. I prize honesty and intelligence. What do you think of this?”
He held up his notepad. A picture of a simple box with a button on top was surrounded by arcane symbols and scientific formulae.
“What is it, sir?” said Rutspud.
“My draft design for the despairatron. It causes the user to experience the sum total of all the suffering in Hell in real-time.”
“That sounds terrible, sir.”
“Thank you. Problem is, the despairatron is part of Hell’s suffering matrix and, under the current design, that sum total of suffering includes the suffering inflicted by the despairatron itself. Hell’s suffering plus Hell’s suffering plus Hell’s suffering …”
“Positive feedback loop,” nodded Rutspud.
“Quite. I’m not sure if it would simply deliver infinite suffering or blow up all creation. Still, there are ways to find out ... This way.”
Belphegor pulled on one of the many levers on his wheelchair, and the contraption lurched sideways and down the smooth corridor. Rutspud followed, bathed in the miasma of fumes ejected by the machine’s exhaust pipes.
“Does it run on coal, sir?” he asked.
“Shit,” said Belphegor.
“Sorry?”
“This thing didn’t start out as a wheelchair. I had set out to design a commode and just got carried away. What is it you think we do here?”
Belphegor had stopped at an opening where a gantry platform gave them a commanding view of a factory floor where forges roared, hammers beat sparks from metal sheets and a dozen machines pounded, moulded and welded.
“You make inventions,” said Rutspud. “Machines.”
“Why?”
“To make Hell a more efficient place. A better place.”
“Wrong,” cackled Belphegor.
“Sir?”
“We make Hell a lazier place. We invent things to do demons’ jobs for them or to save the need for doing the job at all. Back when the old Boss first fell, there was nothing here but fire and darkness. Not even pitchforks. Each demon had nothing to rely on but his own strength, his own … creativity. And now … we exist in a Hell of devices and schemes and plans and a million and one targets and measures and assessments. The wheels of Hell grind ever faster, but the damned are still damned and Hell is still Hell. I am a duke of Hell, lord of sloth and, thanks to me, laziness abounds.”
“I like lazy,” said Rutspud.
Belphegor guffawed and slapped Rutspud on the back.
“Then you’ll fit right in. Come.” Belphegor trundled on down the corridor. “The Infernal Innovation Programme is your basic R&D set up, with three main work units. The three Ps, I call them: Places, Pers
onnel and Particulars.”
Belphegor trundled through a pair of swing doors into an office of draughtsman’s desks, cardboard models and surveying equipment.
“Places,” said Belphegor. “These guys handle the architecture.”
“I thought Mulciber was architect of Hell, sir,” said Rutspud.
“Sure, the big showy stuff. The looming towers. The castles of horrors. This place, though, does everything from city planning to centres of torturing excellence. Over there, that’s Dante and Dore – words and pictures, I call ’em. They dream up all the really good stuff. Those guys gave us our nine circles of Hell, you know.”
“Yes sir, I know!” Rutspud made a mental note to have a ‘word’ with Dante later.
Belphegor laughed, something wet and phlegmy rolling in the back of his throat.
“I know what you’re thinking. How can the nine circles have existed in Hell before Dante there came up with them? Time is not as simple as that, Rutspud. Heck, there is no time in Hell. They invented the nine circles and ‘voila!’ – that’s French for ‘what the fuck is that?’ by the way – there have always been nine circles.”
“I see,” said Rutspud, not seeing at all.
“Time is an imprecise thing, but we can’t say the same thing about space. Like Heaven, Hell is of a fixed size and there’s nothing we can do about that. The real challenge for these people is doing more with less. I tell you, we were lost until this guy came along.”
Belphegor screeched to a halt in the midst of a work unit, where a thin fellow with beard and glasses busied over a clay and paper model construction he was working on. Rutspud looked at the designs hanging on fixtures and fittings all around. Black demons tessellated with white angels. Lizard creatures twisted and turned upon themselves. Castles in the air turned through impossible dimensions, turning up into down and making Rutspud’s eyes water.
“What’s this one, Escher?” said Belphegor.
“A Klein Bottle Hell,” said the damned soul.
“I really don’t know what he talks about half the time,” Belphegor chuckled to Rutspud.
“Topographically, the inside of the structure is also the outside,” the man patiently explained. “If the inmate tries to escape, they will only find themselves deeper inside.”
“Escher here actually came to us on secondment from Heaven, but he then got himself into a bit of trouble,” said Belphegor.
“Really?” asked Rutspud.
“I lost a staircase,” said Escher.
“And so he’s with us until he finds it,” said Belphegor.
“And it’s just a staircase?” said Rutspud.
“Not quite,” said Escher.
“What’s this one?” asked Rutspud.
He pointed at a complex sketch hanging on a wall. Images of a human and a demon, locked in a maze of twisting, illogical turns. Rutspud followed it with his finger.
“So, the person comes in here … and then the demon tortures them here … the person moves on and … hey!”
“How about that?” said Belphegor. “The human transformed into their own demon of torture. The malleability of time working in our favour there. We’re still looking forward to the arrival of the mortal who invented that one! Humans torturing themselves is our ultimate goal, speaking of which …” Belphegor thrust his wheelchair forward through further swing doors.
“So if you do find that staircase, let me know,” said Escher.
“And how will I know it when I see it?”
“Oh. You’ll know it.”
“Okay,” Rutspud shrugged gamely and hurried to catch up with Belphegor.
He found himself in an office in which filing cabinets stretched hundreds of feet into the air. At a bank of central desks and on innumerable portable steps, seemingly identical, bespectacled men worked on manila files, checking, making notes and re-filing.
“The Jean-Paul Sartre Dating Agency,” said Belphegor. “Working on the creed that ‘Hell is other people’, the Personnel unit pairs inmates to create that perfect match of utter hatred and horror. Some of the stuff is easy. Put a dozen racists of different ethnicities in a single pit and you’ve already got a thousand years of hilarious self-torture. Aloof intellectuals with football hooligans, communists with fascists, unrepentant gluttons with dieticians. Homoeopathists with Nazi scientists, that’s one of my favourites. But JP truly excels in the field of finding those small, unobvious details that will truly set damned against damned without them ever knowing why they hate each other.”
“And which one’s Sartre, sir?” said Rutspud looking around.
“All of them,” said Belphegor. “He’s been paired up with a hundred versions of himself. Delicious stuff. Onward!”
Via the next set of doors, they entered a space that seemed to house a handful of incompatible features. To Rutspud’s eyes, it appeared that a sadomasochist had set up shop in a carpenter’s workshop, only then to be interrupted by a bloody war between a medieval army and every living creature in creation. Blades and blood, leather and chains, fur and feathers, sawdust and spikes all conspired to create a scene of thorough chaos. In the midst of it, two men pottered about, lost in their own work.
“Here’s the office of Particulars,” said Belphegor. “I know, I know, it may not look like much, but some of Hell’s best ideas are produced here. You must know this chap.”
Rutspud squinted at the man in a dark, blood-spattered tunic.
“Is that Bosch?”
“The very same.”
“I think he designed some of my old colleagues.”
“That’d be work colleagues with weird animal heads and a penchant for either eating people or sticking things up their arses, I should imagine.”
“Sometimes both at the same time,” Rutspud nodded.
“There’s not much variation in his work,” said Belphegor, “but, by Satan’s balls, it’s effective stuff.”
“And who might that tweedy one humming to himself be, sir?”
“Lewis. Relatively new addition. We had truly high hopes for him, but he’s had a lot of trouble adjusting.”
“What’s he making?”
“A wardrobe. That’s all he does. He makes wardrobes. I don’t know, we might have to give up on him.”
“He looks utterly exhausted, sir.”
“Yes, that will be his bedmate.”
“Sir?”
“We’ve got him sharing a room with Clarence. Big male African lion. We thought it would make him happy …”
A gagged and bound figure on a nearby torture rack groaned.
“No, Torquemada, I haven’t forgotten about you,” said Belphegor fondly. “Torquemada here is our crash test dummy. Nothing gets rolled out until it’s been tried out on him. It’s a small role but he’s happy to contribute.”
The ravaged and scarred man groaned wordlessly once more.
Belphegor spun his wheelchair round to face Rutspud.
“And that’s it. Not all of it, but you get the gist. What do you think?”
“What do I think, sir? I think it’s amazing. But … but what would you want me to do?”
“Make sense of it all,” said Belphegor. “These guys are ideas men. Recursive Hells and animal-headed demons are all great, but how should they be used? I gather your gift is the application of inventions to maximise personal laziness.”
“It is,” said Rutspud honestly.
“Then apply these inventions to the real problems in Hell. And maybe we can help make things easier for your lot in the sixth circle.”
“Actually, sir,” said Rutspud, “there is one issue I have with my own team of damned souls.”
“Oh?”
“It’s embarrassing, really. It’s just … I can’t seem to tell which of them are men and which are women. As a demon, I’ve never really had much of a clue about this whole gender thing.”
Belphegor gave him a haughty look.
“Do you need to know what sex they are?”
“
Personal touch, sir. It’s important.”
“But, you know, obviously, that the female ones have …” Belphegor mimed holding a pair of jiggling breasts.
“Well, yes. But some of them are hardly obvious and some of the men … Well, look at Bosch.”
Rutspud pointed at the Dutchman and his sagging fatty chest.
“Ah,” said Belphegor. “Some boob versus moob confusion. Rutspud, I understand. I’ll put our best minds onto it. In the meantime, let me show you something you’ll like. It’s a recent addition to our department.”
“Sir?”
“I call it the creativity hub.”
Spartacus Wilson had been looking forward to the school trip to Bardsey all term long. Naturally, he had absolutely no interest in bird-watching or going to some smelly Welsh island, but that wasn’t what this school trip was about. School trips were never about the place you were going. School trips were about being on a coach with your mates, scoffing your packed lunch on the way there, and trying to cadge the better stuff off the spoilt kids. And then, at the end of the day, they were about spending all your pocket money on more sweets or some pointless tat, stuffing your face again on the way home, and waiting to see who would throw up over the kid next to them.
However, Jefri’s discovery of three monks’ habits could possibly have been the highlight of the entire day. Dressed up, with a coerced Thor Lexworth-Hall behind the camera, Spartacus, Jefri and PJ had already recorded a number of startling short films. Kung Fu Monks had been fun. Wizard Mind Melt had been mildly entertaining. And the discovery of some yet-to-be-installed roller blinds had made Jedi Light Saber Massacre a possibility. But now they had drifted down the corridor to the unrepaired and wonderfully dangerous looking end for what Spartacus had decided would be Haunted Dungeon of Horrors.
Miss Well-Dunn and the Learning Support Assistants were all busy elsewhere, and there was no one to complain about four boys, three of them almost swamped by oversized habits, ducking under the warning tape and into the old cellar. Around them, the fresh new plaster and paint gave way to ancient round-edge stone. The stone ceiling sagged above them and the floor beneath their feet was damp and potholed.
“We shouldn’t be down here,” said Thor.